Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

291 items

Collection Item

14 January 1860

Goodell, William, fl. 1860

The Principia [Vol 1. No. 9 (January 14, 1860)]

One issue of the newspaper "The Principia," dated January 14, 1860. The newspaper states that its purpose is "to promote pure religion, sound morals, Christian reforms" including the abolition of slavery, the caste system, an alcohol. The newspaper...

GLC09886.01

History Now Essay

Women of the West

Virginia Scharff

Geography, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...

Appears in:

9 | The American West Fall 2006

History Now Essay

Andrew Jackson and the Constitution

Matthew Warshauer

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In 1860, biographer James Parton concluded that Andrew Jackson was "a most law-defying, law obeying citizen." Such a statement is obviously contradictory. Yet it accurately captures the essence of the famous, or infamous, Jackson....

Appears in:

22 | Andrew Jackson and His World Winter 2009

History Now Essay

Women's Long Journey for the Vote

Eleanor Clift

Government and Civics

The earliest and most famous expression of the discontent American women felt over their station in life was voiced by Abigail Adams in March 1776 when she urged her husband, the future president John Adams, to “Remember the Ladies, ...

Appears in:

51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights Summer 2018

About page

Yale and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Announce 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winners

Award Program to Take Place February 28, 2024 New Haven, Connecticut, November 14, 2023 — Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition today has announced the finalists for the twenty...

About page

Yale and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Announce 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Finalists

New Haven, Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition today has announced the finalists for the twenty-sixth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards...

History Now Essay

Lemuel Haynes, Young African American Patriot of the 1770s

John Saillant

Literature, Religion and Philosophy

In 1776, Lemuel Haynes was a young veteran of the War of Independence who was envisioning his future. He had been an indentured servant from his birth in 1753 to his coming of age in 1774. After being released from indenture, he...

Appears in:

69 | The Reception and Impact of the Declaration of Independence, 1776-1826 Winter 2023

History Now Essay

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence

Hollis Robbins

Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time." Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

History Now Essay

Lincoln and Whitman

David S. Reynolds

Government and Civics, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The relationship between Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln has long been the stuff of legend. According to one report, in 1857 Lincoln in his Springfield law office picked up a copy of Whitman’s poetry volume Leaves of Grass , began...

Appears in:

History Now Essay

A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington

James G. Basker

Government and Civics, Literature

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington....

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014